Blogging Away Debt

Welcome Readers from Fred Brock’s Article in The New York Times!

Hi everyone stopping by from the New York Times Article by Fred Brock. I must say, it was an honor to speak to Mr. Brock. I read his book, Health Care on Less Than You Think, and it helped me tremendously since we didn’t have health insurance at the time.

Anyways, a few tidbits about my site:

1.) I post monthly where my money went, and share what we are doing to try to keep our spending down.

2.) I post monthly how much we make. We currently make around $36,000/year (because my husband is currently out of work), but I am always trying to bring in more income.

3.) I post almost every day and usually it is personal finance related.

4.) You can bookmark this site to keep updated, or if you have a feed reader you can Subcribe to my Full Feed. If you have an email address, you can also Subscribe via Email. Every day that I post you will receive one email with the posts that I wrote for that day.

5.) I love comments and I love the interaction I have with my readers. Don’t be shy, feel free to leave a comment or contact me at bloggingawaydebt [at] yahoo [dot] com.

As for where to start, here’s something I wrote that highlights my frugal posts of 2006.

My Top Frugal Posts of 2006

Thank you for stopping by, and feel free to stick around for a while 🙂

A Few Updates

by Tricia

I was concerned whether my health insurance would cover my visit to the doctor for my miscarriage. Since my policy does not cover prenatal care, I wasn’t sure what to think. Would they consider the miscarriage something that was prenatal? I tried asking the hospital when I would get the bill (because I am very anxious to know), but they couldn’t give me an answer. They told me to wait for the mail.

Well, I received an email from my health insurance stating that I have an explanation of benefits available to view. I logged in so fast to find out. The explanation was only for some lab work that was done (the ultrasound and a tissue culture) but they covered it. In fact, I only have to pay $22.50 for those things. That was very good news. Now, it’s a matter of waiting for the doctor visit, my RHOGAM shot and my blood work.

I finished our federal taxes and we will owe a little more than $800. Ouch. This morning I initiated a transfer from our savings account to cover the payment. As for the state taxes, I haven’t finished it yet but it appears we will owe about $60. I know some people think that it’s better to pay less into taxes and having to owe than to have a refund. I’d much rather not have to scrounge up the money to pay for taxes that we owe. Taking from our savings account hurts. If you look to the right, our savings is only a little over $1,000 since I had to withdraw $1,000.

I’ve been dragging my feet on completing the other thing that will add to our debt. I have to revise our 2005 taxes due to a costly error. I could play the audit game, but I don’t want to go there. It’s already a year of interest we owe and I don’t want to owe any more. For this payment, we do not have enough money in our savings to cover that and we will likely have to enter a payment plan with the IRS or I may decide to use a credit card check to pay the bill. I’m not sure what to do yet. Having debt with the IRS scares me because they have the power to seize accounts. If something bad should happen, I would rather owe money that we can’t pay to the credit cards.

Savings going down…debt going up. Not good, but there isn’t much I can do about it but face it and get over with it and move on.